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Nothing Like a Little Planning

Blanche, you know how we always say get the barf bag? Well, on that Transat plane that was trapped on a runway in Ottawa for about six hours in the stifling heat, a kid needed a barf bag and didn’t get one. So…he lost his cookies all over the people on the plane.

That was just one of the issues that those people suffered through for an interminable amount of time. Now there is an ‘inquiry’. Seriously? What’s to inquire about?

Like we said at the time, we would have been on our phone calling every news media known to man, 911, the fire department, CSIS, the FBI and anyone else you can dream of. We would not have sat for hours and hours on a plane with no air conditioning, no water, no food and the best part…no working bathrooms.

Transat is pretty dumb to get to the point where there is an inquiry, allowing passengers to vent publicly. This most likely happened because they offered about $400 per person for what they went through. Had they come forward like an upstanding company, all those people would not be rehashing the entire episode. Short-sighted, n’est pas? Stay away from Transat.

So where were you August 31, 1997? It was Sunday morning when we all heard the news of the horrific death of Lady Diana.

Everybody knows the story: She was set up from the beginning by Prince Charles who needed an heir and a spare to the throne. Once she fulfilled that duty the jig was up. Charles not so quietly let on that he was really in love with that Bowles woman who he eventually married.

The Queen recently made it very clear that she will not give up the throne until she dies and longevity runs in the family. Charles is now 68 years old and no closer to becoming king than he was ten years ago. We are pretty sure that we are not the only ones who hope the Queen passes over him in favour of William.

We may not be flooded by Hurricane Harvey, but we will certainly feel the effects of the storm for a while. Gas prices are about to skyrocket here because the refineries were damaged and right now no one knows when they will be up and running.

While we do have reserves here, we are guessing that they are being kept for a real emergency which this is not. Given that, why do we feel like our government is using this catastrophe to raise the prices way above what they should be? Because our government is sneaky and has their hands in our pockets and would definitely do that.

While Houston’s drainage systems could never have handled such an insane amount of rain, perhaps the damage could have been lessened had there been proper planning.

On Monday, the US Army Corps of Engineers started releasing water from the Addicks and Barker dams in west Houston. Officials said it was safer for nearby neighborhoods to manage the water with controlled releases instead of letting uncontrolled water flow over the edge of the dams. The dams control the flow of water into Buffalo Bayou, a winding Houston river surrounded by residential areas.

Why were houses allowed to be built there in the first place?

Houston has had unprecedented growth with little regard for their infrastructure. Its metro area measures nearly 9,000 square miles – an area larger than New Jersey. Developers and the city both benefited from the huge increase in population at the expense of proper planning.

Houston is a low-lying city in a coastal floodplain that’s a frequent target for Gulf hurricanes. Its policies and building codes underestimate the potential hazards of flooding. For example, many places across the nation have requirements for how high above the ground homes and businesses should be built — to protect against possible flooding. They create what’s called a freeboard — the distance a building must be built above the level of the highest flood that occurs every 100 years.

Nashville has a four foot freeboard – Houston a one foot freeboard.

All of this does not lessen the misery of the people right now. Nor will it help the over 80% with no flood insurance. But now perhaps we can understand why they couldn’t get that flood insurance in the first place. It behooves the government there to think before rebuilding in certain areas as they cannot possibly fix the infrastructure in a few months or even a few years.

A Montreal women put her two girls on a school bus yesterday morning, the first day of school. She went back to pick them up at the end of the school day, around 2:45. No kids. No bus. She didn’t find them until 5:30 when she had to go get them at the bus company office. Seems someone goofed and forgot to list the stop for these girls.

Here’s our question: Does the bus driver have no cell phone? Could he not have called his office and told them there are two little girls with no stop? Obviously the driver is in the same category as those with peas for brains. Very, very small peas. He should be the bus cleaner at the end of the day. Not the bus driver who is unable to deal with a pretty simple situation.

No Blanche. You didn’t miss it. There’s nothing about Trump today. First time in over a year.

Good Shabbos We’ll talk…

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